Stupid Reasons

Dan Marchant has been in the games industry for a long time, and knows his stuff. He’s been writing a series of posts about stupid reasons to go into game development. Here’s an excerpt from part 4:

The assumption seems to be that there are a huge number of developers out there who simply don’t care if their game is good and thus it will be easy for a new team to come in and do well.

In my experience that is almost never the case. I have worked with a many, many different teams on a wide variety of product types including original games, conversions and licensed games and in almost every case the developers care deeply about the game they are making. So, if developers start out with the best intentions for the games they make, how come so many games end up being lacklustre? Could it be that making great games is actually rather hard? Could there be a reason for all the poor games out there? Actually I can think of 10 reasons just for starters….